Simon Laks: one-act comic opera revived in Marseille
(August 2009)
Simon Laks’s comic opera L’Hirondelle inattendue (The Unexpected Swallow), composed in 1965, received its concert premiere at the Festival Musiques interdites in Marseille on 23 July. This was the first time the music had been heard since its belated premiere production for Polish television in 1975. The Orquestre Philharmonique de l’Opéra de Marseille was joined by a cast including French chanson legend Marie Laforêt, conducted by Lukasz Borowicz. Further performances of the 40-minute opéra-bouffe are planned in April 2010 in Warsaw and June 2010 in Terezín (Theresienstadt).
Simon Laks (1901-83) was one of the rising stars in a group of elite Polish musicians active in Paris in the 1930s. He was interned under the Vichy government in 1941 and ultimately deported to Auschwitz, where he worked as a musician, arranger, and finally conductor of the orchestra of the men’s section of the Auschwitz II-Birkenau extermination camp.
Thankfully he survived the war and returned to Paris after the liberation, while maintaining contacts with Polish musical life. He worked post-war as a composer, in the film industry, and in later years as a writer and translator. His music, including the opera, is published by Boosey & Hawkes in Berlin, and an edition of his songs is in preparation.
“A journalist and a pilot are forced to make an emergency landing in paradise and find themselves in a circle of famous animals. The dove from Noah’s ark, Franz Schubert’s trout, the serpent from paradise, Sherlock Holmes’s ‘Hound of the Baskervilles,’ the bear of Bern, and other animals – they are all amazed by the newly arrived, tattered bird that calls itself the ‘Suburban Swallow’, after a famous French chanson from 1912... Simon Laks’s L’Hirondelle inattendue comes along like a piece of ‘absurd musical theatre’ whose verbal wit finds its counterpart in music that is composed with charm and technical mastery ... This gem of twentieth-century operatic literature must not be allowed to be forgotten.”
Opernwelt
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Photo: Boosey & Hawkes
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